SanDisk 's 1.8-inch UATA 5000 SSD drive is available as an option for the Latitude D420 ultra-mobile and Latitude D620 ATG semi-rugged notebooks. Pricing in the US kicks off at $300 for the D620. Dell has confirmed the drives will be available "soon" in the UK but has yet to firm up pricing for this side of the pond.

The 32GB drive was first unveiled in January and sports SanDisk's patented TrueFFS flash memory management technology. It's said to deliver an operational life of 2 million hours along with sustained read speeds of 62MB/sec. Average access times clock in at 0.12 milliseconds.

Dell claims the drive boosts overall system performance by 23 per cent and slashes boot times by 34 per cent on both the D420 and D620. Dell has not quoted battery life figures but, with no moving parts, it's likely that mains-free longevity will also benefit.